- “With 118 phantom clinics and over $100 million in bogus billings, this group of international gangsters allegedly ran a veritable fraud franchise.”
---
From the New York Times
An Armenian-American crime syndicate stole the identities of doctors and thousands of patients and used them and more than a hundred spurious clinics in 25 states to bill Medicare for more than $100 million for treatments no doctor ever performed and no patient ever received, the federal authorities announced on Wednesday.
Prosecutors said the case represented the largest Medicare fraud operation ever carried out by a single group that resulted in criminal charges. The group succeeded in stealing $35 million in Medicare reimbursements, officials said, before the charges were leveled and arrests were made on Wednesday.
The “highly organized massive scheme” is at the heart of a racketeering indictment and other charges unsealed in federal court against 44 people, including a number of members of the Armenian crime group, according to the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors in New York and Georgia.
“With 118 phantom clinics and over $100 million in bogus billings, this group of international gangsters allegedly ran a veritable fraud franchise,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement announcing the charges. “As charged, they stole taxpayer dollars earmarked for the elderly and infirm and got away with it, until now.”
As of early Wednesday afternoon, 41 of the people accused had been arrested, 21 of them in the New York City area, and a number of others in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the authorities said. They included Armen Kazarian, whom the authorities identified as a “Vor,” a term that means “thief-in-law” and refers to a member of a select group of high-level criminals from Russia and the countries that had been part of the Soviet Union, including Armenia.
---
Further reading: